I called into question the idea of an automatically unified and integrated self. A vast body of theory, clinical practice and research has accumulated which calls this assumption gravely into question. Split brain research and resulting theories, clinical experiences with multiple personalities and auditory hallucinations, as well as psychoanalytic theory (Freud and Jung especially) and its offspring are all useful starting points in revising a simplistic view.

For instance, Berne, the founding father of Transactional Analysis, saw us as beings organised into at least three different semi-autonomous and incompletely conscious subselves. These he called the Parent, the Adult and the Child. The extent to which these subselves are in harmonious cooperation is one of the determinants of well-being.

A model of therapy often used in coordination with Transactional Analysis is the Gestalt Therapy of Fritz Perls whose most fundamental tenet is that we are divided beings seeking to become whole. His therapy is a form of consultation between conflicting aspects of the person.

I am also aware of the literature which deals with not just dissociated multiple personalities but also mediumship.

None of that prepared me for the shock I felt on revisiting a diary entry of mine from early 2000, which recorded some dream work I had done. I was looking for some notes I took at about that time on the subject of near-death experiences. This was something altogether different.

One way of working a dream, as I have describedelsewhere, is the Gestalt technique of assuming the role of a dream element, whether that be a person or a thing and speaking in its voice. In the dream the night before the entry was made I had seen myself reflected in a mirror as a woman, so, when I woke, I worked on the dream by stepping into her presence and speaking her thoughts.

The Dragon of Smoke Escaping from Mt Fuji (for source of image see link)

‘So you have found me at last,” she says out of her mirror. “Do you like what you see? Will you turn away from me again? My delicacy looks vulnerable and you do not trust me in your world. You do not trust me to be your guide. You think I’ll come to harm. I am not so delicate as you think. Or you fear I’ll bring you to harm. Look at my eyes – a deep deep black. I am in a way your soul. I am the unacknowledged strivings of your truest self. I am beauty. I am truth. I am life. I am love. I am your connection with the infinite. Through me you can know what lies out of your reach otherwise. I know what feeds your spirit and what does not. I am the repository of all the rich experiences you have ever known. Who do you think listens to this Chopin you are playing right now? Who responds to the views of Mount Fuji? Why do you never give me the time truly to savour those wonders? Why do you always wrench me away into the arid distractions of your daily unlife? Why when you usually write this journal do you never wait for me to have my say? Why do you fill it will the froth that floats on top of your mind? Is my path too steep for you? Do you fear your being will not bear the strain of it? Do you fear that paying attention to my concerns will make you careless of your responsibilities in the world? That is not true. Working in the world from my perspective will be richer and more telling.

‘When I look back over your day I can explain why you were so silent for so much of it. Do you remember your thoughts about suffering? All the people that you encountered [she names them but it is best I do not for reasons of confidentiality] – they all speak to the same issue. Suffering is not what we think it is. Its fire turns the clay of our imperfections to flawless china; suffering perfects the soul and enables it to rise to its highest destiny.

‘You do not believe that. I can feel the writhing of your disbelief. You revolt against the idea of bearing such sorrows and such pains in this world. You feel you could not ever do so. You want to evade such pain. That may be your good fortune – to avoid it — but it should not blind you to the purpose of suffering in others. Even those who bear it badly will see how they were blessed when they discard their body and ascend. Even if you had been able to think what I am saying you could not have shared it and what you did think was so negative and bleak there was no point in saying it. So you stayed silent and felt sad. If you have truly learned your lesson from this – which I doubt – you will not turn your back on me again. Try what this life is like – the life lived in full consciousness of me.’

The power of this took my breath away. What’s more I was stunned to realise that I had forgotten the whole encounter entirely, even though I wrote it down so fully at the time and added: ‘I would like to pledge that I will explore the world from this perspective to the best of my ability. But can I do so?’

My doubts were clearly well-founded.

There are many ways of interpreting this persona or sub-personality. Jung’s idea of the anima is perhaps the first to spring to mind. One website defines the anima as follows:

The anima is both a personal complex and an archetypal image of woman in the male psyche. It is an unconscious factor incarnated anew in every male child, and is responsible for the mechanism of projection. Initially identified with the personal mother, the anima is later experienced not only in other women but as a pervasive influence in a man’s life.

Jung did not see this as the soul in the way my sub-self forcefully asserted herself to be.

The anima is not the soul in the dogmatic sense, not an anima rationalis, which is a philosophical conception, but a natural archetype that satisfactorily sums up all the statements of the unconscious, of the primitive mind, of the history of language and religion. … It is always the a priori element in [a man’s] moods, reactions, impulses, and whatever else is spontaneous in psychic life.[“Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” CW 9i, par. 57.]

And the depth and power of the spiritual insights my mirror-self articulates, especially concerning suffering, seem at odds with all that is written about the anima.

The link with suffering might be giving me a clue to where some of the passion of the persona derives from. I have explored at length how my parent’s grief over my sister’s death four years before I was born scorched my early years.

In addition, the rebukes she spits out about my not devoting time to immersing myself in deep experiences resonates with my work over the years on improving my powersofreflection (see diagram at the foot of this post for my latest perspective on this).

None of this though quite accounts for the sense of a whole personality expressing itself in this outburst – a personality to whom I have denied expression, something I have failed to integrate. I have consigned her to fulminating under the surface most of the time. The anger is searing.

It is possible that the persona was not in fact the anima at all, but rather something more akin to another concept Jung explores in his essay on the mana-personality (Collected Works, Volume 7, page 236). It is something around which the ego unconsciously revolves rather as the earth circles round the sun. He writes:

I call this centre the self.… It might equally well be called the ‘God within us.’ The beginnings of our whole psychic life seem to be inextricably rooted in this point, and all out highest and ultimate purposes seem to be striving towards it.

The Society of Friends refers to ‘that of God within us.’ Bahá’u’lláh Himself writes (AHW: 13):

There is at least one fully articulated model of therapy that incorporates a sense of a higher self and seeks to help us connect with it: this is Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis, which I have explored in various places on this blog. A coloured adaptation of his basic diagram illustrates this perspective clearly enough for now.

Clearly I need to take great care before jumping to the conclusion that this passionate dream element was definitely my Higher Self summoning me to better things. Even so, I also need to think hard before yet again dismissing this experience irretrievably to an archive shelf somewhere deep in my memory store.

Perhaps a bit of reflection would help?

There is one other theory that might conceivably apply but which has much that feels dubious about it. I will take a look at that hopefully next week. The explanation is a strange mixture of ideas that resonate with and idiosyncrasies that repel me. I want to dig a bit deeper at least in terms of the best bits.

In preparation for revisiting aspects of the paranormal next week it seemed worth republishing this from 2015.

Here I am, back with Irreducible Mind again. It’s the post sequence on sub-personalities that did it. It reminded me of the topic I avoided blogging about at the time I first read the Kellys’ book: multiple personalities.

I have used the book eagerly to help me explore the idea of genius and to add firepower to my attack on reductionism. I refrained from going over the ground they covered on NDEs because I’d pretty well exhausted that topic on this blog at the time, and I ducked out of tackling reincarnation because I didn’t feel I knew enough. I’ve forgotten what the chapter on Memory was about as it was too hard for me to follow.

But my reasons for steering clear of multiple personalities were somewhat more complex as we will see.

The chapter relating to multiple personalities is written by Adam Crabtree and covers more ground by far than can be tackled in detail here as it deals with ‘automatism’ in general and ‘secondary centres of consciousness’ in various forms.

I think the discussion of automatism may have put me off blogging about this chapter as it deals with an area about which I know almost nothing and which, to the modern reader, smacks of what has been dismissed as a kind of Victorian paranormalism. I will quote briefly what Crabtree says on this topic as it clearly deserves more serious investigation than it has received in most of the last century.

Automatism

Crabtree points out (page 305) how Myers explained what for him was a link between automatic writing and ‘unconscious cerebration.’ This led him to go one step further (page 306):

A secondary self – if I may coin the phrase – is thus gradually postulated, – a latent capacity, at any rate, in an appreciable fraction of mankind, of developing or manifesting a second focus of cerebral energy which is apparently neither fugitive nor incidental merely, – a delirium or a dream – but may possess for a time at least a kind of continuous individuality, a purposive activity of its own.

He came to believe (page 307) that all the various forms of automatism ‘resulted from the action of additional centres of true conscious intelligence operating outside the normal awareness of the individual.’

One of the most dramatic examples comes from William James (page 351):

[Automatic writing] maybe produced at an extraordinary speed, or be almost invisibly minute. James (1889) described a case in which the writer, with his face the whole time buried in his elbow on the side away from his writing, first writes out an entire page without lifting the pencil from the paper, and then goes back and dots each i and crosses each t ‘with absolute precision and great rapidity.’

I have no reason to suppose that someone with as much integrity as William James, whose work I havebloggedaboutelsewhere, would have fabricated this evidence nor, with his sharp acumen, would he have been easily deceived. Such data requires investigation, and if examples of that ability still survive in this sceptical age they require a better explanation than ‘It must have been a fraud.’

However, this area is not my strong point so I am going to move on to a particularly interesting part of the evidence surrounding multiple personalities.

Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film Posters: for source of image see link

Multiple Personalities

Whereas automatic writing, these days, may be a phenomenon difficult to replicate, examples of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), though perhaps still somewhat controversial, would be far easier to find and therefore to systematically investigate.

Studies (Bahnson and Smith 1975 – page 349) have detected significant differences in such measures as ‘heart rate, respiration, and skin potential taken during audio-visually recorded psychotherapy sessions with a multiple personality patient over an eight month period.’ They concluded that ‘alter personality states of MPD are physiologically distinct states of consciousness.’ These measures would shift with changes in mood and arousal even without MPD involvement, though it is the consistency over time that points towards the conclusion they draw in the end.

What begins to sound slightly more dramatic is the finding (Matthew at al 1985 – page 350), using neuroimaging techniques, that ‘multiple measurements of blood flow in the brain showed that personality change produced significant differences in cerebral blood flow in the right temporal lobe.’

These findings are still regarded as lacking in sufficient rigour to convince sceptics. Other more dramatic ones even more so (page 348):

In an early survey of psychophysiological phenomena in MPD, B. G. Braun (1983) noted previous clinical reports indicating that striking physiological differences were sometimes observed between “alter” personalities in a multiple personality case, including alterations in handedness, rate and ability to heal, response to medication, and allergic responses. In this article, Braun also described three multiple personality cases of his own which involved the appearance and disappearance – depending on the personality in control of the body – of allergies to citrus fruit, cigarette smoke, and cats.

Emily Kelly goes into even greater detail on this issue in her chapter on psychophysiological influences (page 168).

There have also been reports of changes in handedness or handwriting across personalities… As many as 26% of MPD patients show allergies in some personalities but not in others… In a survey of 100 cases, 35% involve alter personalities which responded differently to foods, and in nearly half the cases they responded differently to medications… B. G. Braun . . . reported a case in which a woman who developed adult-onset diabetes ‘required variable amounts of insulin depending on which personality had control.’

That credible investigators claim to have discovered such effects seems to me to require that sceptics, instead of rubbishing them out of hand, should delve more deeply into the data themselves and set up studies of their own. Assuming that such findings prove robust, they will have implications about the mind/brain/body relationship that must undermine many of the prevalent assumptions, including the one that states that the mind is entirely reducible to the brain.

Crabtree makes a strong case for seeing the evidence amassed by the Society for Psychical Research (PSR) and Myers himself in his masterwork Human Personality (page 353) as providing ‘impressive,’ and in his view, ‘compelling evidence for the reality of supernormal phenomena.’ He then indicates that, in the context of automatisms, he will be examining such phenomena under three headings: ‘creativity, motor automatisms and mediumship, and experimental psi research.’ This takes us beyond MPD in its strict clinical sense, but adds another dimension to the theme that our consciousness is split into various domains.

Perhaps the most convincing case for mediumship is that of Mrs Leonara Piper, whose activities began in the 1880s. She produced information about both the living and the dead over a 40 year period and was rigorously investigated for 15 years, including being followed by detectives (page 357): ‘Despite all this, she was never discovered in deception or fraud.’

William James made a little known declaration to the SPR in 1896 (page 359):

If you will let me use the language of the professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by a particular instance. If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t to seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you can prove one single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs Piper. In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears that she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge maybe I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape.

Summary

Crabtree ends by summarising Myers’s formulation of this area of research (page 363) according to five central features:

(1) Phenomena such as hysteria (then thought to be the underpinning of what came to be known as MPD), automatic writing and mediumship led investigators to ‘posit centres of consciousness outside the awareness of the primary consciousness’;

(2) These ‘consciousness centres must be regarded . . . as personalities or selves’;

(3) These centres may sometimes be aware of one another;

(4) Automatisms and psi are strongly linked; and

(5) There is a Subliminal Self (page 364) which is aware of all the activity of all centres and has ‘its roots in a transcendental environment of some sort.’

His final overall conclusion as expressed below may be particularly hard for our materialistic and ego-centred culture to accept but, Crabtree argues, needs to be seriously considered because of the sheer weight of rigorously replicated evidence in its favour (page 364):

Myers . . . insisted that our ordinary consciousness is not on top in any significant way, and that, as a matter of fact, what is most sublime in us and what is most original, derive from the subliminal, from what is out of sight, and from what, in the last analysis, must be our most essential Self.

. . . . all souls [must] become as one soul, and all hearts as one heart. Let all be set free from the multiple identities that were born of passion and desire, and in the oneness of their love for God find a new way of life.

In preparation for a couple of posts later this week it seemed a good idea to republish this sequence.

A Community of Selves?

I have pondered this issue over many decades. It seems that the person who is writing this now may not be the same person who did the first draft years ago. I am not, of course, referring to my body even though it may have replaced most of its cells in that time, as cell replacement does not seem necessarily to entail self-replacement. As the brain, if not driven to new learning, tends to lose cells rather than grow new ones, the brain I’m using now may be significantly smaller than it was when I wrote the first draft, but will be otherwise the same, I should not be greatly changed as a result.

It is the person that I have my doubts about. I have had to select one of my selves to edit this post at this point, and I had to trust that the me who did so would not be too out of step with the me who originally wrote it!

That the self is vast there is no doubt. According to Bahá’u’lláh it contains the universe enfolded. Other spiritually oriented people generally share the same view. One poet, who was a Jesuit priest, wrote:

I have already gone over in detail the implications of meditation and the Third ‘I’ and the three–brainmodels.

That can all seem a bit dramatic – a bit like the Great Brain Robbery.

It goes something like this.

Lots of people, when they’re explaining the value of mindfulness and meditation, describe the body as our car. So, if I think I’m the driver of this car, in full control, I’m deluded. I’ve been car-jacked.

Yes, my centre of awareness is in the driving seat, hands on the wheel and feet on the pedals, but every seat in the car is taken by a presence that’s holding a gun to my head. Directly behind me is Johnny Fear, known to his friends as Mr Rabbit. On my left is Jimmy Rage, the ‘auld croc.’ Back left is Sissy Thinker, who thinks she’s the brains of the outfit.

In the worst case scenario, I can hear an occasional thud and grunt from the boot of the car where they have locked my True Self, tightly bound and gagged. What he knows but I don’t is that their guns are loaded with blanks. They’re all bluff and thunder but no lightning at all.

When Sissy Thinker has bought into an ideology that sees almost everyone except her gang as a sworn enemy and unbeliever, Jimmy Rage takes control of the car and goes on a killing spree. Either that, or Mr Rabbit grabs the wheel, slams his foot on the accelerator and makes a run for it.

As we’ve looked at those issues in enough detail already, I’ll focus now on how to understand another aspect of the complexity of our interior in less loaded terms, more to do with our cultural conditioning than our evolutionary and instinctual heritage.

The Bahá’í Perspective

To get us going, what might be the beginnings of a Bahá’í perspective on all this?

No two men can be found who may be said to be outwardly and inwardly united.

There are many passages in the Bahá’í Writings that explain various ways in which each of us can experience or be subject to divisions within, to a point at which one part of us is even in conflict with another. Such conflicts have implications for our relationships with others but it is not my purpose to consider those in detail now.

The focus of this post is the community of selves within each of us. Where is the evidence that we are more than one self?

The above quotation from Bahá’u’lláh describes us as not inwardly united, which implies that we may be inwardly divided. Bahá’u’lláh also talks of the self but in ways that conflict. For example, we are enjoined to flee the self as a prison[1] on the one hand, and to turn our sight towards it, on the other, and see Bahá’u’lláh as God standing within us[2]. We clearly cannot be talking about the same self in each case. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi develop this idea in many places[3].

Furthermore ‘Abdu’l-Bahá describes character as coming in three kinds – innate, inherited and acquired: there is also natural capacity and acquired capacity.[4]

There is in addition the question of divine attributes (Bahá’u’lláh, GleaningsXXVII):

Upon the reality of man… He hath focussed the radiance of all of His names and attributes… and made it a mirror of His own self.

This multitude of varied attributes is hard to reconcile into one concept of God let alone integrate into a single self as the unwavering centre of a unified consciousness![5]

If the Bahá’í picture suggests at least a family of selves, what does the Western world think? I shall draw for the most part on psychology in the profile that follows.

The layman seems typically to value consistency, which, in effect, means singleness. In psychology too the assumption has sometimes been that there really is a unity, accounting for differences and inconsistencies within the same person by variations of the trait perspective. However a vast body of theory, clinical practice and research has accumulated which calls this assumption gravely into question. Split brain research and resulting theories[6], clinical experiences with multiple personalities[7] and the auditory hallucinations of people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia[8], as well as psychoanalytic theory (Freud and Jung especially) and its offspring[9] are useful starting points in getting our bearings.

For instance, Berne, the founding father of Transactional Analysis, saw us as beings organised into at least three different semi-autonomous and incompletely conscious subselves. These he called the Parent, the Adult and the Child[10]. The extent to which these subselves are in harmonious cooperation is one of the determinants of well-being.

A model of therapy often used in coordination with Transactional Analysis is the Gestalt Therapy of Fritz Perls[11] whose most fundamental tenet is that we are divided beings seeking to become whole. His therapy is a form of consultation between conflicting aspects of the person.

Split-brain research strongly suggests that the left and right halves of the brain function in distinct ways. If they become surgically or traumatically disconnected then the patient can be shown to process reality in simultaneous but conflicting ways. Radical developments in academic psychology and its research take the view that no such thing as personality in the traditional sense exists. We are constructed from our social experience. Roles and the internalised descriptions of others produce an illusion of solid selfness. However, rather as with the proverbial onion, once you take these layers away is there nothing left above and beyond these disparate and ephemeral imaginings!

Amartya Sen, in Identity and Violence, expresses his view that our multiple identities are inescapable and to be celebrated (page 172) partly at least because there is the danger of intolerant extremism once we ‘think of [our]selves only as Hindus or only as Muslims (who must unleash vengeance on “the other community”) and as absolutely nothing else: not Indians, not subcontinentals, not Asians, not members of a shared human race.’

Next time we’ll look at some implications of these possibilities.

Notes:

Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words (Persian) no. 40.

Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words (Arabic) no. 13.

See ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions chapter 64, and Shoghi Effendi in Living the Life 28.

See ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions chapter 56.

See the Long Healing Prayer for a concentrated exposure to this problem.

See N. Ornstein. Multiminds: A New Way to Look at Human Behaviour. Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1986.

Here I am, back with Irreducible Mind again. It’s the post sequence on sub-personalities that did it. It reminded me of the topic I avoided blogging about at the time I first read the Kellys’ book: multiple personalities.

I have used the book eagerly to help me explore the idea of genius and to add firepower to my attack on reductionism. I refrained from going over the ground they covered on NDEs because I’d pretty well exhausted that topic on this blog at the time, and I ducked out of tackling reincarnation because I didn’t feel I knew enough. I’ve forgotten what the chapter on Memory was about as it was too hard for me to follow.

But my reasons for steering clear of multiple personalities were somewhat more complex as we will see.

The chapter relating to multiple personalities is written by Adam Crabtree and covers more ground by far than can be tackled in detail here as it deals with ‘automatism’ in general and ‘secondary centres of consciousness’ in various forms.

I think the discussion of automatism may have put me off blogging about this chapter as it deals with an area about which I know almost nothing and which, to the modern reader, smacks of what has been dismissed as a kind of Victorian paranormalism. I will quote briefly what Crabtree says on this topic as it clearly deserves more serious investigation than it has received in most of the last century.

Automatism

Crabtree points out (page 305) how Myers explained what for him was a link between automatic writing and ‘unconscious cerebration.’ This led him to go one step further (page 306):

A secondary self – if I may coin the phrase – is thus gradually postulated, – a latent capacity, at any rate, in an appreciable fraction of mankind, of developing or manifesting a second focus of cerebral energy which is apparently neither fugitive nor incidental merely, – a delirium or a dream – but may possess for a time at least a kind of continuous individuality, a purposive activity of its own.

He came to believe (page 307) that all the various forms of automatism ‘resulted from the action of additional centres of true conscious intelligence operating outside the normal awareness of the individual.’

One of the most dramatic examples comes from William James (page 351):

[Automatic writing] maybe produced at an extraordinary speed, or be almost invisibly minute. James (1889) described a case in which the writer, with his face the whole time buried in his elbow on the side away from his writing, first writes out an entire page without lifting the pencil from the paper, and then goes back and dots each i and crosses each t ‘with absolute precision and great rapidity.’

I have no reason to suppose that someone with as much integrity as William James, whose work I havebloggedaboutelsewhere, would have fabricated this evidence nor, with his sharp acumen, would he have been easily deceived. Such data requires investigation, and if examples of that ability still survive in this sceptical age they require a better explanation than ‘It must have been a fraud.’

However, this area is not my strong point so I am going to move on to a particularly interesting part of the evidence surrounding multiple personalities.

Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film Posters: for source of image see link

Multiple Personalities

Whereas automatic writing, these days, may be a phenomenon difficult to replicate, examples of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), though perhaps still somewhat controversial, would be far easier to find and therefore to systematically investigate.

Studies (Bahnson and Smith 1975 – page 349) have detected significant differences in such measures as ‘heart rate, respiration, and skin potential taken during audio-visually recorded psychotherapy sessions with a multiple personality patient over an eight month period.’ They concluded that ‘alter personality states of MPD are physiologically distinct states of consciousness.’ These measures would shift with changes in mood and arousal even without MPD involvement, though it is the consistency over time that points towards the conclusion they draw in the end.

What begins to sound slightly more dramatic is the finding (Matthew at al 1985 – page 350), using neuroimaging techniques, that ‘multiple measurements of blood flow in the brain showed that personality change produced significant differences in cerebral blood flow in the right temporal lobe.’

These findings are still regarded as lacking in sufficient rigour to convince sceptics. Other more dramatic ones even more so (page 348):

In an early survey of psychophysiological phenomena in MPD, B. G. Braun (1983) noted previous clinical reports indicating that striking physiological differences were sometimes observed between “alter” personalities in a multiple personality case, including alterations in handedness, rate and ability to heal, response to medication, and allergic responses. In this article, Braun also described three multiple personality cases of his own which involved the appearance and disappearance – depending on the personality in control of the body – of allergies to citrus fruit, cigarette smoke, and cats.

Emily Kelly goes into even greater detail on this issue in her chapter on psychophysiological influences (page 168).

There have also been reports of changes in handedness or handwriting across personalities… As many as 26% of MPD patients show allergies in some personalities but not in others… In a survey of 100 cases, 35% involve alter personalities which responded differently to foods, and in nearly half the cases they responded differently to medications… B. G. Braun . . . reported a case in which a woman who developed adult-onset diabetes ‘required variable amounts of insulin depending on which personality had control.’

That credible investigators claim to have discovered such effects seems to me to require that sceptics, instead of rubbishing them out of hand, should delve more deeply into the data themselves and set up studies of their own. Assuming that such findings prove robust, they will have implications about the mind/brain/body relationship that must undermine many of the prevalent assumptions, including the one that states that the mind is entirely reducible to the brain.

Crabtree makes a strong case for seeing the evidence amassed by the Society for Psychical Research (PSR) and Myers himself in his masterwork Human Personality (page 353) as providing ‘impressive,’ and in his view, ‘compelling evidence for the reality of supernormal phenomena.’ He then indicates that, in the context of automatisms, he will be examining such phenomena under three headings: ‘creativity, motor automatisms and mediumship, and experimental psi research.’ This takes us beyond MPD in its strict clinical sense, but adds another dimension to the theme that our consciousness is split into various domains.

Perhaps the most convincing case for mediumship is that of Mrs Leonara Piper, whose activities began in the 1880s. She produced information about both the living and the dead over a 40 year period and was rigorously investigated for 15 years, including being followed by detectives (page 357): ‘Despite all this, she was never discovered in deception or fraud.’

William James made a little known declaration to the SPR in 1896 (page 359):

If you will let me use the language of the professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by a particular instance. If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t to seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you can prove one single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs Piper. In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears that she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge maybe I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape.

Summary

Crabtree ends by summarising Myers’s formulation of this area of research (page 363) according to five central features:

(1) Phenomena such as hysteria (then thought to be the underpinning of what came to be known as MPD), automatic writing and mediumship led investigators to ‘posit centres of consciousness outside the awareness of the primary consciousness’;

(2) These ‘consciousness centres must be regarded . . . as personalities or selves’;

(3) These centres may sometimes be aware of one another;

(4) Automatisms and psi are strongly linked; and

(5) There is a Subliminal Self (page 364) which is aware of all the activity of all centres and has ‘its roots in a transcendental environment of some sort.’

His final overall conclusion as expressed below may be particularly hard for our materialistic and ego-centred culture to accept but, Crabtree argues, needs to be seriously considered because of the sheer weight of rigorously replicated evidence in its favour (page 364):

Myers . . . insisted that our ordinary consciousness is not on top in any significant way, and that, as a matter of fact, what is most sublime in us and what is most original, derive from the subliminal, from what is out of sight, and from what, in the last analysis, must be our most essential Self.

. . . . all souls [must] become as one soul, and all hearts as one heart. Let all be set free from the multiple identities that were born of passion and desire, and in the oneness of their love for God find a new way of life.

I have pondered this issue over many decades. It seems that the person who is writing this now may not be the same person who did the first draft years ago. I am not, of course, referring to my body even though it may have replaced most of its cells in that time, as cell replacement does not seem necessarily to entail self-replacement. As the brain, if not driven to new learning, tends to lose cells rather than grow new ones, the brain I’m using now may be significantly smaller than it was when I wrote the first draft, but will be otherwise the same, I should not be greatly changed as a result.

It is the person that I have my doubts about. I have had to select one of my selves to edit this post at this point, and I had to trust that the me who did so would not be too out of step with the me who originally wrote it!

That the self is vast there is no doubt. According to Bahá’u’lláh it contains the universe enfolded. Other spiritually oriented people generally share the same view. One poet, who was a Jesuit priest, wrote:

I have already gone over in detail the implications of meditation and the Third ‘I’ and the three–brainmodels.

That can all seem a bit dramatic – a bit like the Great Brain Robbery.

It goes something like this.

Lots of people, when they’re explaining the value of mindfulness and meditation, describe the body as our car. So, if I think I’m the driver of this car, in full control, I’m deluded. I’ve been car-jacked.

Yes, my centre of awareness is in the driving seat, hands on the wheel and feet on the pedals, but every seat in the car is taken by a presence that’s holding a gun to my head. Directly behind me is Johnny Fear, known to his friends as Mr Rabbit. On my left is Jimmy Rage, the ‘auld croc.’ Back left is Sissy Thinker, who thinks she’s the brains of the outfit.

In the worst case scenario, I can hear an occasional thud and grunt from the boot of the car where they have locked my True Self, tightly bound and gagged. What he knows but I don’t is that their guns are loaded with blanks. They’re all bluff and thunder but no lightning at all.

When Sissy Thinker has bought into an ideology that sees almost everyone except her gang as a sworn enemy and unbeliever, Jimmy Rage takes control of the car and goes on a killing spree. Either that, or Mr Rabbit grabs the wheel, slams his foot on the accelerator and makes a run for it.

As we’ve looked at those issues in enough detail already, I’ll focus now on how to understand another aspect of the complexity of our interior in less loaded terms, more to do with our cultural conditioning than our evolutionary and instinctual heritage.

The Bahá’í Perspective

To get us going, what might be the beginnings of a Bahá’í perspective on all this?

No two men can be found who may be said to be outwardly and inwardly united.

There are many passages in the Bahá’í Writings that explain various ways in which each of us can experience or be subject to divisions within, to a point at which one part of us is even in conflict with another. Such conflicts have implications for our relationships with others but it is not my purpose to consider those in detail now.

The focus of this post is the community of selves within each of us. Where is the evidence that we are more than one self?

The above quotation from Bahá’u’lláh describes us as not inwardly united, which implies that we may be inwardly divided. Bahá’u’lláh also talks of the self but in ways that conflict. For example, we are enjoined to flee the self as a prison[1] on the one hand, and to turn our sight towards it, on the other, and see Bahá’u’lláh as God standing within us[2]. We clearly cannot be talking about the same self in each case. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi develop this idea in many places[3].

Furthermore ‘Abdu’l-Bahá describes character as coming in three kinds – innate, inherited and acquired: there is also natural capacity and acquired capacity.[4]

There is in addition the question of divine attributes (Bahá’u’lláh, GleaningsXXVII):

Upon the reality of man… He hath focussed the radiance of all of His names and attributes… and made it a mirror of His own self.

This multitude of varied attributes is hard to reconcile into one concept of God let alone integrate into a single self as the unwavering centre of a unified consciousness![5]

If the Bahá’í picture suggests at least a family of selves, what does the Western world think? I shall draw for the most part on psychology in the profile that follows.

The layman seems typically to value consistency, which, in effect, means singleness. In psychology too the assumption has sometimes been that there really is a unity, accounting for differences and inconsistencies within the same person by variations of the trait perspective. However a vast body of theory, clinical practice and research has accumulated which calls this assumption gravely into question. Split brain research and resulting theories[6], clinical experiences with multiple personalities[7] and the auditory hallucinations of people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia[8], as well as psychoanalytic theory (Freud and Jung especially) and its offspring[9] are useful starting points in getting our bearings.

For instance, Berne, the founding father of Transactional Analysis, saw us as beings organised into at least three different semi-autonomous and incompletely conscious subselves. These he called the Parent, the Adult and the Child[10]. The extent to which these subselves are in harmonious cooperation is one of the determinants of well-being.

A model of therapy often used in coordination with Transactional Analysis is the Gestalt Therapy of Fritz Perls[11] whose most fundamental tenet is that we are divided beings seeking to become whole. His therapy is a form of consultation between conflicting aspects of the person.

Split-brain research strongly suggests that the left and right halves of the brain function in distinct ways. If they become surgically or traumatically disconnected then the patient can be shown to process reality in simultaneous but conflicting ways. Radical developments in academic psychology and its research take the view that no such thing as personality in the traditional sense exists. We are constructed from our social experience. Roles and the internalised descriptions of others produce an illusion of solid selfness. However, rather as with the proverbial onion, once you take these layers away is there nothing left above and beyond these disparate and ephemeral imaginings!

Amartya Sen, in Identity and Violence, expresses his view that our multiple identities are inescapable and to be celebrated (page 172) partly at least because there is the danger of intolerant extremism once we ‘think of [our]selves only as Hindus or only as Muslims (who must unleash vengeance on “the other community”) and as absolutely nothing else: not Indians, not subcontinentals, not Asians, not members of a shared human race.’

Next time we’ll look at some implications of these possibilities.

Notes:

Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words (Persian) no. 40.

Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words (Arabic) no. 13.

See ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions chapter 64, and Shoghi Effendi in Living the Life 28.

See ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions chapter 56.

See the Long Healing Prayer for a concentrated exposure to this problem.

See N. Ornstein. Multiminds: A New Way to Look at Human Behaviour. Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1986.